i get so many questions from new ps3 owners: what ps3 games should i get? game stores want you to buy the most possible, of course. very few big box stores will tell you that a game is a waste of your time. truth to be told, a lot are. or rather, what seems like a great idea is poorly executed. we aren’t singling you out, turning point: fall of liberty, but if you feel guilty we all understand.

now, i should say that there’s nothing wrong with having all sports titles on your shelf, or only shooters. however, in my experience, many gamers like variety. and as we know, it’s the spice of life.

what i’ve done here is given a list of games every ps3 owner should have on the shelf. most can be obtained cheaply, which is nice too. some are also exclusive to the playstation, and they’ve been marked with an asterisk.

a while back, we wrote that sucker punch was a lot more interested in fucking up a good thing than they were in keep the integrity of the game. sucker punch originally had changed cole mcgrath, but they’ve now decided to change that school of thought. basically, since the game is still in development there’s not a ton of details, but we do know that they’re changing cole back to the guy we know and love. ign has given us a shitload of details [read ign’s infamous 2 details].

infamous compared to infamous2. many, after having seen some hd screens, would argue there simply is no comparison. those of us playing attention to this shit know one thing: they changed cole mcgrath. we wanted an answer. we wanted an explanation. then it turned out sucker punch had been talking… but it wasn’t good.

play-mag, out of the uk, apparently sat down with the developers recently and bring us this:

“Speaking exclusively to Play at its Seattle studio base, Sucker Punch has admitted that it made mistakes in how it made inFamous, but has learnt from them and made significant improvements for inFamous 2. Development director Chris Zimmerman revealed that the studio is now very familiar with the PS3 hardware and is fully prepared to exploit it to make inFamous 2 look the best it can.”

what the fuuuck? they aren’t apologizing for messing up a beloved character?

“We made some really dumb decisions in the last game, but we’ve managed to fix them,” he told us. “It was pretty early on that we knew what we weren’t doing in inFamous that we needed to do in inFamous 2, but we had to tear a whole bunch of stuff up and put it back together. In technical terms the biggest thing that we’ve done is migrate a much larger part of our code to run on the SPUs. The PS3 has this elaborate architecture where there’s a whole bunch of different places you can have your code run and we had it all running in the slow part.”

ok, we KNOW you made some dumb decisions. you tore up cole fucking mcgrath and wrecked his shit. now you’re talking about ‘elaborate architecture’ like any of us are supposed to give a damn?

“By sussing out the hardware Sucker Punch believes it has a game that could never be achieved on another console. “If you look at games like Uncharted 2 that’s a game that you actually can’t do on Xbox no matter how clever you are, there’s just more processing power on the PS3,” Zimmerman explained. “inFamous 2 is going to be the same way. You’ll look at it and see that there’s no way we could have done this game on 360.””

OH COME ON. utlizing the full processing potential of the ps3 is no excuse! why did you CHANGE THE CHARACTER?

today, i bring to you a big, old WTF for you-know-who: sony. specifically infamous. this game was a homerun for sony. its first week sales (june 2009) were 176,000 units. it blasted by stuff like littlebigplanet. then, because it was an exclusive title, sony dropped the price and everyone jumped all over that shit because gamers love that strategy. (sony originally tried dropping its pants but gamers tend not to like THAT strategy.)

when the bigwigs started talking about infamous 2, people went rabid. ‘no fucking way’ breathed gamers. several twitter outages were attributed to this news being dropped. lolz. we’re joking about that last part – maybe. the point is that a lot of people went beserk for this game. and why not? it’s wonderful. remember that little weird bike messenger kind of dude and his pervy portly pal? yeah, they were cool, right? plus the storyline was awesome, and you could be either good OR evil. the trophies were fairly simple to get and with a bit of effort, you could go platinum. winnings all around.

however apparently at e3, sony has recently dropped the news that they have, uh, changed the character of one cole mcgrath. not something like ‘changed his filthy-ass outfit he had on at all times’. not ‘gave him a tan’. no. CHANGED him. now he no longer even looks like the same person. i got my hands on some screenshots, and as you can see below, even the characters themselves are weirded out.

yay!! just read this news on the ps3 blog… looks like we will all be wickedly excited in the coming months.

I’m very excited to officially announce that Cole MacGrath will be returning exclusively to the PS3. This issue will give the very first details of the game and how Sucker Punch has improved every aspect of it. You’ll learn about the new city, new powers and new gameplay. It should be hitting news stands in the next week.

truest thing you will ever hear on the this blog. this comes to me via cracked.com and gamasutra. it’s not a recent article, but it’s an interesting piece of the science of video games. it is also a critical piece of information anytime someone tells you people aren’t stupid.

in a nutshell, behavioural science can be applied to gamers, and developers practice them. here’s a gem:

“Each contingency is an arrangement of time, activity, and reward, and there are an infinite number of ways these elements can be combined to produce the pattern of activity you want from your players.”

think about it for a second. even if you take away the fact that they’re focusing more on the in-game stuff, this has outside implications too. for instance, games for the ps3 used to be priced around $50. this was pretty reasonable. then it went to $60. people grumbled, but paid it. then it climbed to $70 – because people had paid the increase. game publishers have stated that they want more.

then consider the price drops. why did infamous get a price drop? because it’s a sony exclusive, and sony wants you to buy their machines. you may not WANT the game, but at $30? hell yeah you’ll pick that shit up.

anyway, check out the behavioural gaming article. i won’t lie, parts of it are extremely boring, but there’s a lot of good stuff in there.

nothing like the news of a good game to get us perked up. while we loooooved infamous so much we almost mar… BAHAHAHAH can’t even get that out with a straight face. but seriously, infamous was a great game.

information has just come to us that infamous 2 is a bit closer to becoming reality. while no one has confirmed it will also be a ps3 exclusive, we do have these details about a web site registered to sony…